Freedom, Bounded and Unbounded: The Justification of Coercive Force in Balthasar's Account of Human Freedom
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Balthasar seems well‐qualified to mediate even‐handedly an ongoing dispute between traditional Augustinian and Thomistic ethics and more recent cross‐focused ethical frameworks over the legitimacy of coercive force. Unlike some cross‐centred theologians, he does not categorically reject coercive force, aligning more closely with Alasdair MacIntyre's views and traditional Augustinian and Thomistic thought. However, Balthasar's thought suggests a stronger emphasis on reformative justice, which echoes Christ's kenotic gift of freedom‐granting grace to all but those who obdurately refuse it. In the resulting paradigm, legitimate use of force attempts to undo the terms on which it was necessary to coerce, thereby maintaining the priority of freedom while nevertheless granting that coercion may sometimes be legitimate. While these conclusions are not novel, his rigorously cross‐centred account of their grounding makes him a relevant voice in the debate.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".